What is the client’s reason for wanting the report to be kept secret (however briefly–and how briefly will it be)? Will you insist on knowing that before signing on? And will that reason be disclosed in the final, public release of your “report”?

If the reason is, say, competitive financial advantage, aren’t you are really serving a private purpose, whose dimensions and ramifications you might not even know?

To the extent you try to do BOTH, won’t you be vulnerable to suspicion of a conflict of interest in both areas? (Imagine the disclosures! … or won’t there be any disclosures?)

What if the “news” you find–i.e. defined as the truth that’s important for the public to know–rebounds ON the client? Will you withhold it, because the client’s not interested?

Frankly, I don’t know how a reporter can even CONCEIVE of what to report without thinking of the public. But, I admit, the word “public” is starting to sound quaint.

We summarized your article in English on our blog and translated that summary into Spanish and Portuguese to send to our audience in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Best,
Joseph Vavrus
Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

It’s a great piece and opens up all kinds of ideas for coming up with innovative ways to make use of the journalist’s skills. In the image of the journalist, there is often little difference between a PI and a investigative journalist and it seems real life is emulating that.

I particularly like the idea of having individuals contacting the investigative unit to do work on a story of interest. I think you point out the tricky grounds involving ethics and traditional journalism practices, but I’m not sure that’s a major problem (as you conclude) as long as the journalists involved behave as traditional journalists always have. I don’t see much difference between an editor assigning a reporter an assignment or a group assigning a reporter an assignment requested by a client — as long as that information can eventually reach the public and as long as the assignment isn’t mean-spirited or for revenge (i.e. exposing a company that someone doesn’t like could get tricky — although an argument could be made if a company is doing something corrupt it really doesn’t matter what the client’s motive is. It’s similar to a whistle-blower calling the IRS to investigate an annoying neighbor. If the neighbor isn’t doing anything wrong, it wouldn’t matter.)

Joe Saltzman, Professor of Journalism and Director, Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC), a project of the Norman Lear Center, USC Annenberg

One of the ideas which has been tossed around in the past, but sort of edged out of focus in the midst of the current debate about general reader paywalls and micropayments, is the idea of “Freemium” content which may be expensive to produce and targeted at a limited reader base. An area which doesn’t seem to have been explored well in the freemium model is the business-to-business realm in a local market. What I mean by this are those things such as legal filings, government RFPs, zoning variances and a blizzard of other data which may not be particularly interesting to a general readership but crucial to a smaller group.

Although this may sound like expensive content to produce, the reality is that the nature of the news business has always been to filter things, to present the top tier of what’s out there based on an editorial judgement of what the largest group of readers would like to see. A beat reporter might be checking probate filings regularly, for example, but only generate an actual probate-based story every six months.

An additional possible advantage of a B-to-B subset of content production is that it could move the existing turn-ink-into-pixels advertising stream into one geared more towards marketing services. And although it may seem as if there may be ethical gray areas involved in this, the distinction is that you’re not writing nice stories about a business because they paid for it; you’re providing information to help them make money.

We’ve already seen some of the capability for doing this in the EveryBlock open-source project, and with specialized business journals and legal publications in larger markets.

Now that I’m a laid-off *former* IT reporter and editor, I’m doing almost nothing but marketing and analysis work, with journalism relegated to hobby status in my life.

Times change. I try to change with them, maybe even stay a little ahead of things…

Full disclosure: I’m an adviser to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, but I’ve never actually talked about this subject with them. I guess I should, huh?

Lisa Williams
Placeblogger.com

An average newspaper (or, say, CNN) is more of a variety show — and as a result, the information on any one topic never gets deep or comprehensive enough to be sold to someone, or if it does, once the story has run its course, the newsroom is on to whatever the next big thing is. A salesforce would always fail if they had to develop entirely new pools of prospects each month.

A business where you have sustained, deep, and comprehensive coverage of a given topic (say, foreclosures, or sports statistics) is also very “webby.” The web rewards “narrow comprehensiveness,” that is, everything about something. That’s another reason news organizations who focus on variety and whatever the hot story of the moment is get taken on the web — entrepreneurs keep peeling off one thing they cover and doing it far better than they can by having a single-purpose site that specializes in that topic. (Think Craigslist — “just classifieds” or Fanbase “just sports teams” — but ALL the sports teams, not just a particular city’s, or even just pro teams).

Lisa Williams
Placeblogger.com